Abstract

The maturity of free and open source movement has brought a number of ICT tools. It has affected the way courses are delivered, the way contents are developed, the way data are interoperable, the way learning and teaching materials are shared, the way learners access classes and the way library resources are shared. In developing countries, several libraries are migrating into digital libraries using low cost technologies readily available due to open access, free and open source technology and e-publishing tools. Recent development of cloud computing technology provides state of art tools for libraries. It provides a common platform for easy information storage and sharing. Thus, there is lowering of the cost required to procure and manage library ICT infrastructure due to the capability of that cloud computing which allows the storage to be on a single, efficient system that saves cost and time. In developing countries where most libraries suffer from limited budgets for ICT services, it is anticipated that the future of digital libraries is on cloud libraries.

1. Introduction

The advent of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has changed the landscape of libraries in the world. The libraries in developed and developing countries no longer depend only from print materials for its customers (Wiederhold, 1995). Thus, with the advancement of ICT even the conventional definition of library need to be revisited so that it includes aspects of electronic resources:

A place in which literary and artistic materials, such as books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, prints, records, and tapes, are kept for reading, reference, or lending. (Hartman, 2007; Plutchak, 2012)

By definition, cloud computing from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is defined as follows:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. (Mell &Grance, 2011).

The cloud computing is characterized by communication, information sharing, collaboration, interoperability and user-centered design. Inherently these characteristics of cloud computing are well embedded in FOSS (Yuan et al., 2008).